Originally Posted by
punkalouver
Unfortunately, there are a certain percentage of pilots who will end up like this every year. It is just the way it is.
I hear a distant cry from a few instructors and flight safety officials in the background, when reading this
How do you keep this percentage down? What is the acceptable loss rate due to incidents like this? How do you comfort the relatives of those, who were also on board with the pilot, but perished due to his/her poor decision making?
Probably the answer is NOT more regulation.
Probably the answer is NOT more training (we can see that inadvertent VFR-->IMC transitions can be just as deadly to instrument rated pilots, who are out of recency and practice)
I wish there was some kind of way to show these folks the feeling of vertigo, when instruments no longer make sense or suspected faulty, that would be great. But there is no such simulator on the ground, which could trick your inner ear that way. (Maybe there should be.)
I was lucky in some sense, because I experienced the typical illusions during my basic IR module training. And I can attest: no matter how one can read about it, hear about it, talk to people who had it - the real thing is still a scary experience at first.